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What makes Sass so Syntactically Awesome?

2.
Who am I?
Creator of Compass
Sass Developer
Family man
Engineer at LinkedIn
* New Baby in November
* LinkedIn pays me to work on Open Source Software

3.
I don’t think that Sass is good
because it’s an abstraction; I
think that Sass is good because
it’s a we!-designed abstraction.
Crucia!y, it’s also easy to learn
…just like CSS.
– Jeremy Keith

4.
What makes Sass so
Syntactically Awesome?
A story of taste, co!aboration, and responsiveness.

5.
“It's a new syntax that I don't want to learn or support.”
“It's a terrible idea for a CSS preprocessor
to be whitespace sensitive.”
“Good luck supporting two syntaxes.”
“Why the $ak do I need control directives in CSS?”
–Nathan Borror circa 2009

6.
Sass 2.0 Source
* I thought this kinda sucked but not for any of the reasons it does.
* good things: left-side-scannable, merge conﬂicts, I like white-space
* Bad things: repetition -- sass 2.2 ﬁxed this.

14.
A Problem
No one on the Sass core team
writes stylesheets for a living.
My life has taken me down a path that doesn’t involve as much front-end code.
I don’t think this is a big problem with the right process and approach.
Not a hero -> a servant.

16.
We Listen
I ﬁnd myself o!en doing X,
if Sass did Y,
then X would be simpler & more maintainable.
Even if you don’t know what Y is, once you’ve discovered a pattern, I guarantee you we want to solve it.

18.
We Listen... to the trolls.
Be careful who you ca! a tro!.
Most tro!s are speaking to some
form of the truth.
People who speak out against are
o&en tech promoters too.
Public critique != trolling
Real trolls are trying to make you angry. Genuine engagement is often not expected and is disarming.

21.
Not a Democracy
Consensus breeds mediocrity.
Great projects require great leaders. The quality of the Sass language is thanks to Nathan’s unwavering commitment
to perfection (or as close as we can approximate our understanding of perfection)

22.
New Feature Evaluation
What other ways are there to accomplish the same feature in Sass or CSS.
How does the feature interact with the other Sass features?
Is it intuitive?
Does it make things harder to maintain?
Potential for misuse?

23.
Import globbing
strip-­‐unit function
@include
foo
!important
Properties that are mixins.
@extend
within
@media.
We (Kind-of) Listen
Give users what they need, not what they ask for.

24.
@extend within @media
Sometimes the request, as made, cannot be fulﬁlled.
We would love to allow user to write this.

25.
@extend within @media
Users wanted Sass to move the selectors involved in the @extend query to the media query.
Moving selectors is a very dangerous operation and can break expectations based on source order.
Furthermore, the act of moving selectors is more like @include another break of expectation

26.
@extend within @media
After approximately 1000 requests for this feature it occurred to us that there was another possible output, that
while bloated, didn’t behave unpredictably.

27.
We Listen
“In preparation for its release, we've
put out a couple of release candidates
to be sure that everything was set and
ready to go. Unfortunately, it wasn't.”
Usually, it falls on Nathan and me to tell other people why their features do not cut the mustard. But in this case, the
community told us. & in SassScript failed to be intuitive for the use case of handling multiple parent selectors. Full
write up: https://gist.github.com/nex3/8050187

32.
“It's a new syntax that I don't want to learn or support.”
“It's a terrible idea for a CSS preprocessor
to be whitespace sensitive.”
“Good luck supporting two syntaxes.”
“Why the $ak do I need control directives in CSS?”
–Nathan Borror circa 2009
We were pretty sure control directives did make sense. and it was thanks to the weird syntax...

33.
We Need You!
Subscribe to the issue tracker &
watch issues that look interesting to
you.
Help triage common issues
Conﬁrm bug reports and improve the
information about them.
Identify the commit that caused a
regression (git bisect!)
Provide a workaround for the user
Leave us useful issue comments ~
Disagree with us!
Te! us when we’re on the right track

34.
Community Interaction Guidelines
Not everyone is going to be as tapped
into Sass development as you.
Educate, don't chastise.
The correct response to someone who
is being an entitled jerk is to
disengage.